After our border-line crossing of Mont Blanc, Max and I arrived at the Col du Géant on the evening of August 31, 1911. There we met a German climber armed with a letter of introduction from Martini, who had climbed the Zmutt ridge with us earlier in the season. As our new acquaintance considered ice-climbing to be a vicious and unpleasant way of indulging in the delights of the mountains, a traverse of the Dru was decided upon, in preference to the joys of step-cutting on the slippery slopes of the north face of the Verte. Accordingly, after sunrise on the following morning, we set out across the Géant Glacier towards the Montanvert. Max and I still felt the effects of our recent activities and were consequently inclined to take things rather easily. Before arriving at the top of the icefall, however, our friend’s protests against the slowness of the pace began to take effect and stung us into something that was very much the reverse of our previous lethargy, with the result that we worried a way through the broken icefall with quite a useful turn of speed. Well before arriving in the thick of the séracs, a puzzled and rather concerned expression had taken the place of the patronising though kindly smile with which our companion had blessed the previous labours of his two young associates. A little later, he fell a victim to the fact that the size of an ice-step is inversely proportional to the velocity of the party, and he lost his footing. The rope, however, sufficed to palliate the effects of the slip, but was quite unequal to the task of stemming the torrent of guttural language which condemned as reckless the speed which, after all, merely resulted from the granting of a request! After discarding the rope on the gentle slopes of the Mer de Glace, a normal rate of progress was once more reverted to, and, long ere arriving at the Montanvert, we had all recovered our equanimity.
In the afternoon we left the Montanvert, with three days’ provisions and two one-hundred-foot ropes. Max and I, as usual, carried heavy knapsacks and consequently found the struggle with the moraines leading up towards the Charpoua hut both difficult and unpleasant. Our friend, however, bounded on far ahead with the agility of a two-year-old.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that the hut was not in the dirty condition so characteristic of the majority of the club-huts in the Mont Blanc district, and that it also contained most of those little things which go so far towards making life pleasant after a harrowing and steep climb in the heat of the afternoon.
At 4 a.m. next morning we left the hut, taking with us, in addition to our own two hundred feet of rope, an eighty-foot length belonging to the hut and kept there expressly for the use of climbers bound for the Dru, a stake of wood, and only two ice-axes. At 6 a.m., after having been held up by a rather lengthy bout of step-cutting across the head of the Charpoua Glacier, we gained the lower lip of the final bergschrund. This proved to be an extremely difficult customer to deal with, for the upper lip at its lowest point could only be surmounted by cutting up an exceedingly steep ice wall of about thirty feet in height. After the first fifteen feet, only one hand could be used for cutting, and the work became so severe that a rest was necessary after practically each step. Max and I took turns at the work, each doing a step whilst the other retired to the level floor of the schrund to rest and infuse fresh life into half-frozen fingers. At eight o’clock we gained the upper lip, but, deciding that too much time had been lost for us to be able to complete the climb that day without running the risk of a night out, we drove the wooden stake into the snow and, tying a doubled one-hundred-foot length of rope to it, retreated down the ice wall and joined our companion, whom we acquainted with our decision to retreat, then and there, to the hut.
The bergschrund below the Dru.
“This proved to be an extremely difficult customer....”
Facing page 270.